I suspect that the only reason microsloth bought github is to have direct access to all the metadata of all the software development on it. They want to be able to identify features that would get people to switch to their platforms. They could even do targeted advertising (on github or elsewhere) based on the problems projects/developers are having. I doubt they feel threatened by anything happening on it.

I'm not all that worried. On the other hand, it often pays to have an exit strategy in place.

I don't think they would do anything against Minetest specifically. But I'm still in favor of changing the hosting platform. Creating our own platform is the best solution if we are able to maintain it (I'm a bit skeptical).

If your home has been bought by a Mafia man, would you stay in it?GitHub was yet a business but an independant corporation that had all the reasons to remain neutral. Microsoft is a much bigger one, that owns litterally everything, with many other interests, that can have more unpredictable and harmful reactions. What I fear are changes in GitHub policy, targeted ads or like.And I find this post on GitHub's blog particularly disgusting: https://blog.github.com/2018-06-04-github-microsoft/

To complicate the standpoints a bit: How does it ever feel secure to put the vast trove of the world’s open source code on a venture capital-funded startup? As for being ”independent”, do anyone even know what VCs funded Github to begin with? The fact that tech startups exist solely for the purpose of eventually being bought by the highest bidder should come to a surprise for no one.

Last edited by texmex on Thu Jun 14, 2018 16:50, edited 1 time in total.

Napiophelios wrote:GitLab Ultimate / Gold accounts free for education / open source projects that use OSI-approved open source license and which does not seek to make profit from the resulting project software.

Hamlet wrote:I suggest to add a poll to this thread, so that the Minetest developers can see what is the community's opinion....For those of you who don't feel like standing under the Microsoft's umbrella: https://alternativeto.net/software/github/

+1

While I don't think this is an emergency situation, for anyone that is worried, just create a mirror on another host. No need to jettison all the goods until there is evidence that the ship is sinking.

I am very curious of what the community will see as the preferred alternative. Seems like most are moving to either GitLab or NotABug. From my limited experience, GitLab's user interface appears more similar to GitHub's.

Just the fact though, that MS made such a move (with $ as the core motivator), knowing it would create a huge ripple effect in the open source community, does not instill the notion that they are beginning to act more open minded to the open source world.

What they do with this in the next year, is what I am paying attention to.Regardless of what they do..., they are bound to honor the license of each and every bit of material, which is currently on github, whether they own github or not.

You really wanted someone like Google to buy GitHub, when they kill their own existing projects at random? Microsoft's CodeLab repos were a good start, but not good enough as GitHub. Judging by how much MS uses GitHub, it'd be cheaper for them to outright purchase GitHub than pay the bills.

tl;dr We're fine, Microsoft isn't going to kill the golden goose - if Microsoft did, the purchase was worthless. Because then it's a graveyard, which makes no more money from private repos, so to speak.

We lived through Ubuntu Search Lens and Unity, didn't we? Everything is going to be fine.

GitHub is NOT officially owned by Microsoft yet. The actual transfer of ownership still takes a while. There is still time to escape. ;-)

Oh, by the way, I managed to move my MineClone 2 bugtracker away from GitHub, with help from texmex:https://git.minetest.land/Wuzzy/MineClone2-Bugs/Since that was my only real thing on GitHub, I have nothing left that I could lose on GitHub.Also, I like Gitea, it's interface is a near perfect drop-in replacement. So the argument of usability is already dead. :-)

We should have never been on GitHub in the first place because it is full of proprietary JavaScript which you are forced to execute to perform some functions. It's mostly usable without JS, but still! It's ironic that one of the biggest platform to host free software projects is itself 100% proprietary. No wonder why Microsoft was interested in it. I guess GitHub would have never been bought if the software behind it would be 100% free software.

So, even if you believe that Microsoft won't make GitHub worse … That doesn't matter. It definitely won't change to the better, freedom-wise. Microsoft has no reason to release GitHub's code as free software, or at least the JavaScript code which currently is basically just tons of obfuscated code. >:-O

I also think Minetest should just host their own Gitea-ish instance sooner or later for more independence. Independence is obviously better than to depend on a company, especially if that company owns a product in direct competition with Minetest, i.e. Minecraft. Continuing to depend on GitHub is … risky, to put it mildly.

I mean, think about it: The Minetest website is self-hosted, both wikis are self-hosted, the Content DB is self-hosted. So don't tell me it would be impossible or extremely hard to also self-host the repository. ;-)

I agree with what you wrote in your post, I just have to add one thing that I think is important:Content DB if used with GitHub allows to create a release (e.g. Mod Name v1.0) directly on GitHub - istead, while using it with other git platforms it needs to save a local copy, stored into a zip archive.

Despite I dislike GitHub due to the reasons that you've written in your post, well, under this aspect it is better: releases should stay on their repositories, for simplicity and space saving.

Obviously it may be that this could be achieved with other git platforms, but it would be crazy to ask rubenwardy to check each and every git API to achieve the same.

So I wonder if Mesehub could be eligible to become the official Minetest git, and if it would be possible to make it work like GitHub regarding the Content DB.